Burning Lunges and Loving Kale

I chat with Suzanne often on Twitter. If you’re not following her, I recommend it. She’s a fount of knowledge when it comes to weight lifting. In fact, check out this old guest post she wrote for me about strength training. So I was chatting with her on Twitter because I find that on days I do a lot of lower body exercises (like lunges), I am crippled for days! The bad news: it never gets easier. She admitted that she’s always sore after Leg Days! The good news: it’s time to work through the pain and make my body stronger.

The reason I bring this up is because both Michael and I have noticed that my hamstrings have gotten larger. Noticeably larger. Like when I stand in front of the mirror and turn to the side I can see my hamstrings bulging under my jeans. I was quite surprised when I noticed this fact. I attribute it to Spin class and the lower body weight workouts I’ve been doing.

The other night I went to the gym and hit the elliptical for my cardio, then spent some quality time with the free weights. I did a circuit workout that included a lot of lunges. After talking to Suzanne, I decided it was also time to increase the weights. I bumped up the free weights for all my upper body activities to 15 pounds each (instead of 10 or 12.5 pounds like I’ve been using). I also increased the weight in the plates I hold while doing lunges–two 10 pound weights instead of two 5. BOY DID I FEEL IT! Each lunge burned but it felt good.

Gym Stats:Time: 1:19Calories Burned: 675

When I got home, Michael and I made dinner together. He did the bulk of the cooking. I reheated the leftover brown rice and poured a glass of wine. 😉 Michael blackened some salmon in a skillet to go with the rice and then we also tried something new: kale!

We changed the above recipe a bit. First, we skipped the garlic and we found that the garlic wasn’t necessary in this specific dinner. We used some of the homemade vegetable stock that our friends Bob and Alazar made (I added a bit of water to it).

The kale cooked down quite a bit, so next time I’ll cut more before cooking it. We topped the kale with the cooked bacon pieces (which was delicious). The kale was great! We both enjoyed it a lot and it went really well with the blackened salmon.

Remember how I wanted to start eating Kale to get more nutrients I was lacking in my diet? Well I’m following through! And I love kale! It’s so good. Kale is here to stay in our house. The dinner was so filling, I ended up only eating half of the salmon. I forget how filling rice can be.

For dessert Michael and I had some vanilla pudding. I added slices of fresh strawberries to my dessert. It was a nice meal all around and a great workout.

18 Responses

Hail to the Kale salad by Chef AJ is SO GOOD. The dressing take a bit of a time to prepare, but it’s totally worth it. (Chef AJ is salt/ sugar/ everything fun free, so she uses lime zest in place of salt, but I am lazy and just put salt in instead.)
Recipe video:Eleah recently posted..Post.

I have finally gotten to the point where I can DO lunges this past month. I love the way my legs are toning up. I just push through every other day and workout ev en when I’m sore. My bum bum is soooo sore today from yesterday but it’s a good feeling. I have the ft4 heart rate monitor. How do you like the ft7?

I wish I had a kale recipe to offer but I haven’t really cooked with it yet. We don’t eat bacon though so we will have to keep looking. Best of luck!Ashleysh22 recently posted..Starting on a Journey with Les Mills Pump

Thanks for commenting, Ashley. I think it’s great that you’re able to do lunges now. I totally hear ya! It took me awhile before I could do them and I couldn’t really do it consistently because I’d be so sore. I think increasing the frequency of doing them helped a lot. I recover faster now. I did a bunch of lunges yesterday and I’m NOT sore today (shocker).

You can do the kale in something other than bacon. I’m a fan of the grapeseed oil we use.

I didn’t like kale the very first time I had it at a restaurant. I thought it was spinach and when it was tougher I was confused…and it was a bit bitter. Then I had it again in another restaurant and it was much better.

HI Lisa, over the last year, I’ve become a “kale-aholic”. I make kale chips in a dehydrator, and at LEAST once a week, I have a massaged kale salad for lunch. (I soften the kale with 1 tsp olive oil and lemon/vinegar/lime, whatever acid I have on hand…then top it with nutritional yeast, goat or feta cheese, and grapes or dried cranberries) My friends are actually teasing me about being the kale queen. Funny. Have a wonderful Monday.Roz@weightingfor50 recently posted..Cookies CAN be healthy!